Literature Lab

Gregory Castle from Arizona State University discusses W. B. Yeats's poetry and drama in the context of Irish revivalism.  He focuses on the temporal complexity of writing about this nationalist project.

Gregory Castle from Arizona State University discusses W. B. Yeats's poetry and drama in the context of Irish revivalism.  He focuses on the temporal complexity of writing about this nationalist project.

Robert Crossley talks about the long, strange tradition of Mars writing and its relation to the scientific imagination.  How have Mars and its life-forms been imagined, and how has this imaginative work affected scientific desire?  How has space exploration affected the stories we tell about Mars?  Crossley, professor emeritus at University of Massachusetts, Boston, is the author of Imagining Mars: A Literary History.

Robert Crossley talks about the long, strange tradition of Mars writing and its relation to the scientific imagination.  How have Mars and its life-forms been imagined, and how has this imaginative work affected scientific desire?  How has space exploration affected the stories we tell about Mars?  Crossley, professor emeritus at University of Massachusetts, Boston, is the author of Imagining Mars: A Literary History.

Robert Crossley talks about the long, strange tradition of Mars writing and its relation to the scientific imagination.  How have Mars and its life-forms been imagined, and how has this imaginative work affected scientific desire?  How has space exploration affected the stories we tell about Mars?  Crossley, professor emeritus at University of Massachusetts, Boston, is the author of Imagining Mars: A Literary History.

This interview with Robert Waxler, from UMASS Dartmouth, focuses on the Changing Lives through Literature program for convicts who do a lit class as part of probation.  It's an alternative sentencing program that relies on the deep power of literary narrative to fundamentally transform the sense of self and possibility that one carries into the world.

This interview with Robert Waxler, from UMASS Dartmouth, focuses on the Changing Lives through Literature program for convicts who do a lit class as part of probation.  It's an alternative sentencing program that relies on the deep power of literary narrative to fundamentally transform the sense of self and possibility that one carries into the world.

This interview with Robert Waxler, from UMASS Dartmouth, focuses on the Changing Lives through Literature program for convicts who do a lit class as part of probation.  It's an alternative sentencing program that relies on the deep power of literary narrative to fundamentally transform the sense of self and possibility that one carries into the world.

John Paul Riquelme, from Boston University, talks about the literary genre that will not die.  How do vampires, zombies, and other undead inhabit the literary imagination?  What does the darkness of the gothic mean, and why do we need it?  Where did it come from, what are its contemporary offspring?  And why does the darkness of this dark world give such pleasure?

John Paul Riquelme, from Boston University, talks about the literary genre that will not die.  How do vampires, zombies, and other undead inhabit the literary imagination?  What does the darkness of the gothic mean, and why do we need it?  Where did it come from, what are its contemporary offspring?  And why does the darkness of this dark world give such pleasure?

John Paul Riquelme, from Boston University, talks about the literary genre that will not die.  How do vampires, zombies, and other undead inhabit the literary imagination?  What does the darkness of the gothic mean, and why do we need it?  Where did it come from, what are its contemporary offspring?  And why does the darkness of this dark world give such pleasure?

Leah Price, from Harvard University, talks about the strange lives of books, as material things, in Victorian England.  What kinds of things did people do with them?  How did doing these things with books affect one's place in the social order?  What does all this have to do with books, in their competition with screens, today?

Leah Price, from Harvard University, talks about the strange lives of books, as material things, in Victorian England.  What kinds of things did people do with them?  How did doing these things with books affect one's place in the social order?  What does all this have to do with books, in their competition with screens, today?

Leah Price, from Harvard University, talks about the strange lives of books, as material things, in Victorian England.  What kinds of things did people do with them?  How did doing these things with books affect one's place in the social order?  What does all this have to do with books, in their competition with screens, today?

Lisa Rodensky from Wellesley College talks about Victorian Oprah -- how she takes up a similar cultural function as novelist George Eliot.  Oprah and Eliot shed surprising light on each other.  For all their differences, both seek to instruct our private lives in just about the most public media of their respective times, TV and the serialized novel.  Rodensky talks about their different insights into how we fashion our selves as we try to imagine the lives of others.